The seniors are the people the most sensitive to the wasting of energy due to the fact that they stay at their home most of the time. Thus, they need to watch their energy consumption.

Below, a little video realized by Maxwell Haynes about senior citizens’ commitment in the green economy. The purpose of this video it’s to “improving senior citizens knowledge of saving energy, energy efficiency and the technologies which can help them to produce energy”.

“Let’s see Green” by Maxwell Haynes

Next time, we’ll see more about raising people’s awareness and behavioral sciences.

Around three fourths of Europe’s CO2 emissions are associated with households consumption. Meeting EU’s ambitious climate change targets of reductions in carbon emissions by 2050 will therefore require patterns of household consumption to change radically from the current baseline. Influencing behaviour is a key part of this.

Barcelona, Singapore, Berlin, London, … What have these cities in common? They all want to become the first smart-cities. However, what do we mean by “Smart-Cities”? Have cities been not smart so far? Which concepts underlie this trendy locution? A smart-city is not only a connected city, where millions of data are crunched to offer new services, but also a resilient, energy and resource efficient and sustainable city. What a great program!

The Baden-Württemberg Foundation, which intends to pave the way for cutting-edge research, a variety of training activities and the responsible use of their citizens launched an expedition truck to raise awareness about Smart-Grids through a game. The truck, called “Expedition N”-truck, will be on a year-long tour.

Visitors in the truck can play a multi-player game. Their mission is to reenact the functionality of an intelligent power grid (“Smart Grid”) as a consistent group. They become a kind of “human smart grid” and learn how the energy turn can be achieved by means of intelligent networking of power producers and power consumers.

Behavioural sciences are not accurate sciences. And it’s not easy to successfully engage a behavioural change programme, especially when behaviour changes need some sacrifices and utility loss, such as, in climate change case, travelling less, eating less meat, buying less electronically stuff and so on.

￼Between 2010 and 2012, a programme of research into climate change relevant behaviours has been taken forward by the Scottish Government. Drawing learning, the programme argues that influencing behaviour is crucial, and offers some thinking about how this might be done. Here are 6 tips the late programme’s results highlight:

Energy Services Companies struggle to convince users to save sustainably energy in their professional environment. Simultaneously, the Internet and social networks let spring up new ways of rating services providers. Indeed, “consumers have more power than ever before to call attention to bad products, services, and experiences”. Thus, app developers or luxury touristic hotels can face good and bad reviews from their customers for the value they bring. What if Energy Services Companies used social media to point their users’ bad or energy-wasting behaviours?

They have nothing to sell, and yet they use interesting marketing tools to promote energy savings. Here is a good-to-see video clip the EU Commission provided to raise awareness amongst households and offices. The 3.5-minute story starts with a family which is carelessly and unknowingly wasting energy from the moment they wake up. Until something unexpectively happens…

EU Commission

We’ll see later on other useful and good tools firms can use to raise awareness.

We used to talk a lot about gamification and ways to raise awareness. Here is an interesting example. SIEMENS would like to raise awareness and teach people about new forms of energy through a new, fun game called Power Matrix. It’s free, and it’s beautiful even though one thing is missing apparently: it’s all about power generation and nothing about Energy Efficiency.

Starting with a rural territory where your future city is about to develop, the goal is to provide it with a sustainable power supply through a mix of various energy technologies while keeping a budget. The game flows effortlessly through different energy sources and their effects on the community.

As this blog points it out often, the Energy Efficiency industry seems to be growing apart into two nearly distinct camps: the technical side and the behavior side.“It’s bad enough that we now have these quantitative versus qualitative ideologies glaring at each other from opposite sides of the room, but in many instances they can work against each other.”In his very interesting blog article, NOESIS’ Ryan REID highlighted how to bridge technical and behaviour changes. I tried to sum up here the key insights:

We all choose one or the other side and feel ours is the most important.

We saw in a previous post, that taking the stairs instead of the escalator or elevator can be fun and how we can get more people to take the stairs over the escalator by making it fun to do. Let’s see this time how you could reduce maintenance costs of your building by using some fun tips to push people into taking part of this a priori boring activity.

Let’s see an example of how to throw rubbish in the bin instead of onto the floor. Indeed many people still fail to do so. Can we get more people to throw rubbish into the bin, rather than onto the ground, by making it fun to do? See the results here.

Alex LASKEY, one of the OPOWER‘s founders, gave a great TED presentation about how behaviour changes can help us save energy. This is another great example how to make Energy Efficiency sexy. Here is the 8-min video and his speech I tried to wrap up.

TED: click on the image

How many of you have checked your email today? Raise your hands.

And how about finances? Anybody check that today? Credit card, investment account? How about this week?

In this excellent Guardian article I try here to sum up, Dr Paula Owen explains why ‘gamification’ – using fun and games for serious purposes – is quickly becoming the hottest tool in the sustainability toolkit.

What’s ‘gamification’? It’s simply the concept of taking the ideas behind good games design and games mechanics and applying them to non-gaming environments.

Firms are looking to gamification to increase staff productivity; customer loyalty and, of course, bottom-line profitability. There are already many examples of gamification app, such as:

We know that most of the great technical solutions to save energy are often unfortunately disturbed by the actual behaviour of people who use them or manage them. Examples are numerous: BMS, lighting control systems, HVAC automation systems, and so on. What if we asked ocupants in a given building (offices, public transport, industries, and so on) to regulate their own behaviour.

VOLKSWAGEN launched few years ago a contest dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better.

We saw in a previous post, that taking the stairs instead of the escalator or elevator can be fun and how we can get more people to take the stairs over the escalator by making it fun to do. For the second time, let’s see this time how you could reduce maintenance costs of your building by using some fun tips to push people into taking part of this a priori boring activity.

You feel disappointed. You’ve just presented your amazing Energy Efficiency offer to one of your leads, and it turns out that your client doesn’t seem to be completely convinced by your solution. Yet, the payback time is very decent, the investment not very high and compatible with your client’s budget and the solution is technically guaranteed. Sounds familiar?

As seen in a previous post, there are many different hurdles proactive Energy Efficiency solutions providers have to face. And even though your solution looks great, sometimes you need to align your client’s representatives’ interests. One of the means to do so is to make your offer sexy. How could it be done? Many ways of doing so.